Two figures are going hand in hand in the United States: the growth of GDP and employment on the one hand, and the approval rating for President Barack Obama on the other, approval now returned to the balance between for and against after a year much more negative orientations. Re-election will always be a difficult match for Barack Obama, given the substantially heavy state of employment and income, but if the current situation holds up until the eve of the vote, the picture will be much less compromised than expected.
January 6 data on December jobs are good, taking the official unemployment rate (the real one is worse) from 8,7% in November, revised after an initial 8,6%, to 8,5%, which is the same level as in February 2009. Economists had expected 150 jobs created in the private and public sectors, excluding agriculture, and instead they are now at 200 in December. Unemployment is therefore confirmed to be below 9% and there is still hope that the summer will reach below 8%. Obama's re-election would need it.
However, the consensus among economists says that the current recovery is likely to slow down. A year ago numerous economists, mostly from large banks and financial companies, indicated a 2011 growth of 3,5-4 per cent. It was equal to half of the lower range of that forecast, more or less, but in any case something moved. Former Obama budget secretary Peter Orszag, who now works for Citigroup, identified spending on plant and equipment and software as accounting for 60% of the growth achieved in the third quarter, equal to 1,8% in the most recent data (down). Unemployment benefits fell to June 2008 levels, when the economy had already been in a recession for seven months but no one quite knew it yet. Expectations for 2012, which also saw the usual optimistic upsurge at the beginning of the year, speak of a 2,5-3 per cent increase in GDP.
Europeans have an age-old habit of looking across the Atlantic to feel heartened and there is no doubt that in the heavy and recessionary picture of the current European economy, taking a look at the United States makes, if we stop at a part of the macro data, a little of envy.
However, some caveats should not be ignored. As Stephen Roach, the former authoritative – and correct, which is not automatic in an economist of a large bank – chief economist of Morgan Stanley and now a professor at Yale has been saying for some time, it is not clear where a sufficiently robust push can come from, in a 'economy whose growth is entrusted for more than 70% to consumption, if the growth of the latter remains low and by far the most anemic in the history of all phases of recovery of the US economy.
A second point that should not be forgotten is that despite the recent discrete months for employment, since December 2007, i.e. since the last recession officially ended in June 2009, 6,28 million jobs have been lost and never recovered Work.
A third point brings us back to the calculations made months ago in "Lost Decades" by Jeffry Frieden of Harvard and Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin, calculations which indicate in 3,53 2005 trillion dollars the loss of potential GDP between the last quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of 2014, the date on which it is hoped that the clouds of the great crisis of the beginning of the millennium could really begin to clear.
Will America become a locomotive again? No, the United States has lived and is perhaps running out of recovery. She could still hold out for six months. Just as in six months, if the forecasts of the Ecri of New York (Economic Cycle Research Institute) are correct, the American economy could be on the verge of a new recession. Ecri, a private institution that sells its scenarios to a loyal clientele, is much contested for its skeptical picture, but it must be said that in 15 years it has never been wrong. Let's hope you're wrong now.
If ECRI gets it wrong, Obama can make it. If he's not wrong, it will be difficult, despite a lineup of Republican candidates that so far seems to want to offer the president the best possible chance of re-election.
